18 EIGHT AND LEFT 



RIGHT AND LEFT 



ADULT man is the only animal who, in the familiar 

 scriptural phrase, ' knoweth the right hand from the left.' 

 This fact in his economy goes closely together with the 

 other facts, that he is the only animal on this sublunary 

 planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate 

 language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the 

 musical glasses. His right-handedness, in short, is part 

 cause and part effect of his universal supremacy in animated 

 nature. He is what he is, to a great extent, ' by his own 

 right hand ; ' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly 

 suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were 

 it not for the manifold arts and trades and activities he 

 practises. 



It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage 

 ran. Man was once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles 

 Beade wanted him again to be in his maturer centuries, 

 ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of this volume 

 in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter por- 

 tions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton 

 and the familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not 

 yet penetrated should complain that I speak with un- 

 known tongues, I will further explain for their special benefit 

 that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the right 

 and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang 



